RAINBOW WEATHER

1 2 4 Y R A I N B O W W E A T H E R J A N E S H O R E I first feel it in my body, like hunger or an itch prickling my entire skin, when the light outside feels odd, saturated, tinted greenish gold, it seems to penetrate closed curtains, so that I stop whatever I’m doing, drop the spoon, or the mystery I’m reading, and hurry to the east-facing window where a sun-shower’s busy pelting the meadow’s tall grass. I step out onto the back porch under which generations of snakes nest between the granite boulders of the foundation. When it happens it’s always in the late afternoon, directly over the crab apples where it first likes to show itself – or sometimes it’s a faint shimmer over the solitary willow anchored in the pasture, or drifting farther east, above the ridge of the Max Gray Road, where it intensifies, steeping the sky in its seven-banded chord of color that lasts a minute, then vanishes, Or it may loiter for a half-hour – 1 2 5 R neighbors will phone neighbors to go look outside. Occasionally it’s a lucky double – like the time I knew that I was pregnant; and because I know exactly where it will be, I love to show it o√. I point to the sky above the crabapple. I wait. It appears, as if commanded, to an astonished round of applause. Greg Mosher, who sold us our house, must have known where to look, and the Bassages before him, the Knoxes before them, all five Peck boys and girls, their father, and his father before him, farmer who chose the trees to fell, positioned the beams, and pitched the view just so – storm clouds scuttling away, sun warming his back, like the first astonished witness on his home-made ark, beholding the covenant, the promise. ...